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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Forums and social news media are radically different experiences, I'm not understanding why are we even comparing the two.

A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of.

Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion).

There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars.

Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations.

[1]https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

[2]https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/

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In most forums I know the long running threads are mostly the "tell a joke" threads, which collect some off topic posts. Most other discussions are short lived as elsewhere.

The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.

It’s more complicated. Topics in a forum are ordered by last answer. So, if usually most discussion are short lived, any topic can also can be revived at any time.

Which is usually called "necroposting" and is universally frowned on for... some reason. I never really got why, but on-line communities are strange beasts, and most tend to have a culture actively opposing accumulation and surfacing of knowledge.

yeah, that especially annoys me when I come across a dead thread that somehow made its way to SERP or something and someone helpfully provided a correct answer. maybe forums need a 'don't bump' checkbox enabled by default or something for old threads

I literally posted forums with years-long discussions (or threads), and those are mostly topic-specific.

That's irrelevant to what the OP said. You're describing the fundamental difference of the user experience for members.

OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here.

Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.

On this point, forums are about fostering a community. Social media is about sniping comments. Metafilter has the best implementation I thought, which is you subscribe and can't comment for 30 days so it stops reactionary commenting at the outset and then tell people this is about community and when you have a community you watch how the community behaves and assimilate to that.

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